OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A wearable anti-gravity supplement to therapy does not improve arm function in chronic stroke: a randomized trial
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Background: Gravity confounds arm movement ability in post-stroke hemiparesis. Reducing its influence allows effective practice leading to recovery. Yet, there is a scarcity of wearable devices suitable for personalized use across diverse therapeutic activities in the clinic. Objective: In this study, we investigated the safety, feasibility, and efficacy of anti-gravity therapy using the ExoNET device in post-stroke participants. Methods: Twenty chronic stroke survivors underwent six, 45-minute occupational therapy sessions while wearing the ExoNET, randomized into either the treatment (ExoNET tuned to gravity-support) or control group (ExoNET tuned to slack condition). Clinical outcomes were evaluated by a blinded-rater at baseline, post, and six-week follow-up sessions. Kinetic, kinematic, and patient experience outcomes were also assessed. Results: Mixed-effect models showed a significant improvement in Box and Blocks scores in the post-intervention session for the treatment group (effect size: 2.1, p = .04). No significant effects were found between the treatment and control groups for ARAT scores and other clinical metrics. Direct kinetic effects revealed a significant reduction in muscle activity during free exploration with an effect size of (-7.12%, p< 005). There were no significant longitudinal kinetic or kinematic trends. Subject feedback suggested a generally positive perception of the anti-gravity therapy. Conclusions: Anti-gravity therapy with the ExoNET is a safe and feasible treatment for post-stroke rehabilitation. The device provided anti-gravity forces, did not encumber range of motion, and clinical metrics of anti-gravity therapy demonstrated improvements in gross manual dexterity. Further research is required to explore potential benefits in broader clinical metrics.
Learning Phonotactics from Linguistic Informants
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

We propose an interactive approach to language learning that utilizes linguistic acceptability judgments from an informant (a competent language user) to learn a grammar. Given a grammar formalism and a framework for synthesizing data, our model iteratively selects or synthesizes a data-point according to one of a range of information-theoretic policies, asks the informant for a binary judgment, and updates its own parameters in preparation for the next query. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our model in the domain of phonotactics, the rules governing what kinds of sound-sequences are acceptable in a language, and carry out two experiments, one with typologically-natural linguistic data and another with a range of procedurally-generated languages. We find that the information-theoretic policies that our model uses to select items to query the informant achieve sample efficiency comparable to, and sometimes greater than, fully supervised approaches.
Off-Road Autonomy Validation Using Scalable Digital Twin Simulations Within High-Performance Computing Clusters
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Off-road autonomy validation presents unique challenges due to the unpredictable and dynamic nature of off-road environments. Traditional methods focusing on sequentially sweeping across the parameter space for variability analysis struggle to comprehensively assess the performance and safety of off-road autonomous systems within the imposed time constraints. This paper proposes leveraging scalable digital twin simulations within high-performance computing (HPC) clusters to address this challenge. By harnessing the computational power of HPC clusters, our approach aims to provide a scalable and efficient means to validate off-road autonomy algorithms, enabling rapid iteration and testing of autonomy algorithms under various conditions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework through performance evaluations of the HPC cluster in terms of simulation parallelization and present the systematic variability analysis of a candidate off-road autonomy algorithm to identify potential vulnerabilities in the autonomy stack's perception, planning and control modules.
Honeyfile Camouflage: Hiding Fake Files in Plain Sight
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Honeyfiles are a particularly useful type of honeypot: fake files deployed to detect and infer information from malicious behaviour. This paper considers the challenge of naming honeyfiles so they are camouflaged when placed amongst real files in a file system. Based on cosine distances in semantic vector spaces, we develop two metrics for filename camouflage: one based on simple averaging and one on clustering with mixture fitting. We evaluate and compare the metrics, showing that both perform well on a publicly available GitHub software repository dataset.
Dual-Image Enhanced CLIP for Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Image Anomaly Detection has been a challenging task in Computer Vision field. The advent of Vision-Language models, particularly the rise of CLIP-based frameworks, has opened new avenues for zero-shot anomaly detection. Recent studies have explored the use of CLIP by aligning images with normal and prompt descriptions. However, the exclusive dependence on textual guidance often falls short, highlighting the critical importance of additional visual references. In this work, we introduce a Dual-Image Enhanced CLIP approach, leveraging a joint vision-language scoring system. Our methods process pairs of images, utilizing each as a visual reference for the other, thereby enriching the inference process with visual context. This dual-image strategy markedly enhanced both anomaly classification and localization performances. Furthermore, we have strengthened our model with a test-time adaptation module that incorporates synthesized anomalies to refine localization capabilities. Our approach significantly exploits the potential of vision-language joint anomaly detection and demonstrates comparable performance with current SOTA methods across various datasets.
The Impact of Human Aspects on the Interactions Between Software Developers and End-Users in Software Engineering: A Systematic Literature Review
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Context: Research on human aspects within the field of software engineering (SE) has been steadily gaining prominence in recent years. These human aspects have a significant impact on SE due to the inherently interactive and collaborative nature of the discipline. Objective: In this paper, we present a systematic literature review (SLR) on human aspects affecting developer-user interactions. The objective of this SLR is to plot the current landscape of primary studies by examining the human aspects that influence developer-user interactions, their implications, interrelationships, and how existing studies address these implications. Method: We conducted this SLR following the guidelines proposed by Kitchenham et al. We performed a comprehensive search in six digital databases, and an exhaustive backward and forward snowballing process. We selected 46 primary studies for data extraction. Results: We identified various human aspects affecting developer-user interactions in SE, assessed their interrelationships, identified their positive impacts and mitigation strategies for negative effects. We present specific recommendations derived from the identified research gaps. Conclusion: Our findings suggest the importance of leveraging positive effects and addressing negative effects in developer-user interactions through the implementation of effective mitigation strategies. These insights may benefit software practitioners for effective user interactions, and the recommendations proposed by this SLR may aid the research community in further human aspects related studies.
The Impact of Perceived Tone, Age, and Gender on Voice Assistant Persuasiveness in the Context of Product Recommendations
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Voice Assistants (VAs) can assist users in various everyday tasks, but many users are reluctant to rely on VAs for intricate tasks like online shopping. This study aims to examine whether the vocal characteristics of VAs can serve as an effective tool to persuade users and increase user engagement with VAs in online shopping. Prior studies have demonstrated that the perceived tone, age, and gender of a voice influence the perceived persuasiveness of the speaker in interpersonal interactions. Furthermore, persuasion in product communication has been shown to affect purchase decisions in online shopping. We investigate whether variations in a VA voice's perceived tone, age, and gender characteristics can persuade users and ultimately affect their purchase decisions. Our experimental study showed that participants were more persuaded to make purchase decisions by VA voices having positive or neutral tones as well as middle-aged male or younger female voices. Our results suggest that VA designers should offer users the ability to easily customize VA voices with a range of tones, ages, and genders. This customization can enhance user comfort and enjoyment, potentially leading to higher engagement with VAs. Additionally, we discuss the boundaries of ethical persuasion, emphasizing the importance of safeguarding users' interests against unwarranted manipulation.
ACORN: Aspect-wise Commonsense Reasoning Explanation Evaluation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Evaluating the quality of free-text explanations is a multifaceted, subjective, and labor-intensive task. Large language models (LLMs) present an appealing alternative due to their potential for consistency, scalability, and cost-efficiency. In this work, we present ACORN, a new dataset of 3,500 free-text explanations and aspect-wise quality ratings, and use it to evaluate how LLMs rate explanations. We observed that larger models outputted labels that maintained or increased the inter-annotator agreement, suggesting that they are within the expected variance between human raters. However, their correlation with majority-voted human ratings varied across different quality aspects, indicating that they are not a complete replacement. In turn, using LLMs as a supplement to a smaller group of human raters in some cases improved the correlation with the original majority labels. However, the effect was limited to cases where human raters were scarce, and an additional human rater had a more pronounced effect in all cases. Overall, we recommend against using LLMs as a complete replacement for human raters but encourage using them in configurations that end with targeted human involvement. Data available here: https://github.com/a-brassard/ACORN
FlexEControl: Flexible and Efficient Multimodal Control for Text-to-Image Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Controllable text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models generate images conditioned on both text prompts and semantic inputs of other modalities like edge maps. Nevertheless, current controllable T2I methods commonly face challenges related to efficiency and faithfulness, especially when conditioning on multiple inputs from either the same or diverse modalities. In this paper, we propose a novel Flexible and Efficient method, FlexEControl, for controllable T2I generation. At the core of FlexEControl is a unique weight decomposition strategy, which allows for streamlined integration of various input types. This approach not only enhances the faithfulness of the generated image to the control, but also significantly reduces the computational overhead typically associated with multimodal conditioning. Our approach achieves a reduction of 41% in trainable parameters and 30% in memory usage compared with Uni-ControlNet. Moreover, it doubles data efficiency and can flexibly generate images under the guidance of multiple input conditions of various modalities.
Sorting multibay block stacking storage systems
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

Autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) are increasingly used to automate operations in intralogistics. One crucial feature of AMRs is their availability, allowing them to operate 24/7. This work addresses the multibay unit load pre-marshalling problem, which extends pre-marshalling from a single bay to larger warehouse configurations with multiple bays. Pre-marshalling leverages off-peak time intervals to sort a block stacking warehouse in anticipation of future orders. These larger warehouse configurations require not only the minimization of the number of moves but also the consideration of distance or time when making sorting decisions. Our proposed solution for the multibay unit load pre-marshalling problem is based on our two-step approach that first determines the access direction for each stack and then finds a sequence of moves to sort the warehouse. In addition to adapting the existing approach that integrates a network flow model and an extended A* algorithm, we additionally present an exact constraint programming approach for the second stage of the problem-solving process. The results demonstrate that the presented solution approach effectively enhances the access time of unit loads and reduces the sorting effort for block stacking warehouses with multiple bays.
Explaining Clustering of Ecological Momentary Assessment Data Through Temporal and Feature Attention
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

In the field of psychopathology, Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) studies offer rich individual data on psychopathology-relevant variables (e.g., affect, behavior, etc) in real-time. EMA data is collected dynamically, represented as complex multivariate time series (MTS). Such information is crucial for a better understanding of mental disorders at the individual- and group-level. More specifically, clustering individuals in EMA data facilitates uncovering and studying the commonalities as well as variations of groups in the population. Nevertheless, since clustering is an unsupervised task and true EMA grouping is not commonly available, the evaluation of clustering is quite challenging. An important aspect of evaluation is clustering explainability. Thus, this paper proposes an attention-based interpretable framework to identify the important time-points and variables that play primary roles in distinguishing between clusters. A key part of this study is to examine ways to analyze, summarize, and interpret the attention weights as well as evaluate the patterns underlying the important segments of the data that differentiate across clusters. To evaluate the proposed approach, an EMA dataset of 187 individuals grouped in 3 clusters is used for analyzing the derived attention-based importance attributes. More specifically, this analysis provides the distinct characteristics at the cluster-, feature- and individual level. Such clustering explanations could be beneficial for generalizing existing concepts of mental disorders, discovering new insights, and even enhancing our knowledge at an individual level.
A trust management framework for vehicular ad hoc networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) enable road users and public infrastructure to share information that improves the operation of roads and driver experience. However, these are vulnerable to poorly behaved authorized users. Trust management is used to address attacks from authorized users in accordance with their trust score. By removing the dissemination of trust metrics in the validation process, communication overhead and response time are lowered. In this paper, we propose a new Tamper-Proof Device (TPD) based trust management framework for controlling trust at the sender side vehicle that regulates driver behaviour. Moreover, the dissemination of feedback is only required when there is conflicting information in the VANET. If a conflict arises, the Road-Side Unit (RSU) decides, using the weighted voting system, whether the originator is to be believed, or not. The framework is evaluated against a centralized reputation approach and the results demonstrate that it outperforms the latter.
A fuzzy reward and punishment scheme for vehicular ad hoc networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Trust management is an important security approach for the successful implementation of Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs). Trust models evaluate messages to assign reward or punishment. This can be used to influence a driver's future behaviour. In the author's previous work, a sender side based trust management framework is developed which avoids the receiver evaluation of messages. However, this does not guarantee that a trusted driver will not lie. These "untrue attacks" are resolved by the RSUs using collaboration to rule on a dispute, providing a fixed amount of reward and punishment. The lack of sophistication is addressed in this paper with a novel fuzzy RSU controller considering the severity of incident, driver past behaviour, and RSU confidence to determine the reward or punishment for the conflicted drivers. Although any driver can lie in any situation, it is expected that trustworthy drivers are more likely to remain so, and vice versa. This behaviour is captured in a Markov chain model for sender and reporter drivers where their lying characteristics depend on trust score and trust state. Each trust state defines the driver's likelihood of lying using different probability distribution. An extensive simulation is performed to evaluate the performance of the fuzzy assessment and examine the Markov chain driver behaviour model with changing the initial trust score of all or some drivers in Veins simulator. The fuzzy and the fixed RSU assessment schemes are compared, and the result shows that the fuzzy scheme can encourage drivers to improve their behaviour.
Self-supervised Gait-based Emotion Representation Learning from Selective Strongly Augmented Skeleton Sequences
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Emotion recognition is an important part of affective computing. Extracting emotional cues from human gaits yields benefits such as natural interaction, a nonintrusive nature, and remote detection. Recently, the introduction of self-supervised learning techniques offers a practical solution to the issues arising from the scarcity of labeled data in the field of gait-based emotion recognition. However, due to the limited diversity of gaits and the incompleteness of feature representations for skeletons, the existing contrastive learning methods are usually inefficient for the acquisition of gait emotions. In this paper, we propose a contrastive learning framework utilizing selective strong augmentation (SSA) for self-supervised gait-based emotion representation, which aims to derive effective representations from limited labeled gait data. First, we propose an SSA method for the gait emotion recognition task, which includes upper body jitter and random spatiotemporal mask. The goal of SSA is to generate more diverse and targeted positive samples and prompt the model to learn more distinctive and robust feature representations. Then, we design a complementary feature fusion network (CFFN) that facilitates the integration of cross-domain information to acquire topological structural and global adaptive features. Finally, we implement the distributional divergence minimization loss to supervise the representation learning of the generally and strongly augmented queries. Our approach is validated on the Emotion-Gait (E-Gait) and Emilya datasets and outperforms the state-of-the-art methods under different evaluation protocols.
Dual-domain Collaborative Denoising for Social Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

Social recommendation leverages social network to complement user-item interaction data for recommendation task, aiming to mitigate the data sparsity issue in recommender systems. However, existing social recommendation methods encounter the following challenge: both social network and interaction data contain substaintial noise, and the propagation of such noise through Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) not only fails to enhance recommendation performance but may also interfere with the model's normal training. Despite the importance of denoising for social network and interaction data, only a limited number of studies have considered the denoising for social network and all of them overlook that for interaction data, hindering the denoising effect and recommendation performance. Based on this, we propose a novel model called Dual-domain Collaborative Denoising for Social Recommendation ($\textbf{DCDSR}$). DCDSR comprises two primary modules: the structure-level collaborative denoising module and the embedding-space collaborative denoising module. In the structure-level collaborative denoising module, information from interaction domain is first employed to guide social network denoising. Subsequently, the denoised social network is used to supervise the denoising for interaction data. The embedding-space collaborative denoising module devotes to resisting the noise cross-domain diffusion problem through contrastive learning with dual-domain embedding collaborative perturbation. Additionally, a novel contrastive learning strategy, named Anchor-InfoNCE, is introduced to better harness the denoising capability of contrastive learning. Evaluating our model on three real-world datasets verifies that DCDSR has a considerable denoising effect, thus outperforms the state-of-the-art social recommendation methods.
P-ICL: Point In-Context Learning for Named Entity Recognition with Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

In recent years, the rise of large language models (LLMs) has made it possible to directly achieve named entity recognition (NER) without any demonstration samples or only using a few samples through in-context learning (ICL). However, standard ICL only helps LLMs understand task instructions, format and input-label mapping, but neglects the particularity of the NER task itself. In this paper, we propose a new prompting framework P-ICL to better achieve NER with LLMs, in which some point entities are leveraged as the auxiliary information to recognize each entity type. With such significant information, the LLM can achieve entity classification more precisely. To obtain optimal point entities for prompting LLMs, we also proposed a point entity selection method based on K-Means clustering. Our extensive experiments on some representative NER benchmarks verify the effectiveness of our proposed strategies in P-ICL and point entity selection.
Frequency-Assisted Mamba for Remote Sensing Image Super-Resolution
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Recent progress in remote sensing image (RSI) super-resolution (SR) has exhibited remarkable performance using deep neural networks, e.g., Convolutional Neural Networks and Transformers. However, existing SR methods often suffer from either a limited receptive field or quadratic computational overhead, resulting in sub-optimal global representation and unacceptable computational costs in large-scale RSI. To alleviate these issues, we develop the first attempt to integrate the Vision State Space Model (Mamba) for RSI-SR, which specializes in processing large-scale RSI by capturing long-range dependency with linear complexity. To achieve better SR reconstruction, building upon Mamba, we devise a Frequency-assisted Mamba framework, dubbed FMSR, to explore the spatial and frequent correlations. In particular, our FMSR features a multi-level fusion architecture equipped with the Frequency Selection Module (FSM), Vision State Space Module (VSSM), and Hybrid Gate Module (HGM) to grasp their merits for effective spatial-frequency fusion. Considering that global and local dependencies are complementary and both beneficial for SR, we further recalibrate these multi-level features for accurate feature fusion via learnable scaling adaptors. Extensive experiments on AID, DOTA, and DIOR benchmarks demonstrate that our FMSR outperforms state-of-the-art Transformer-based methods HAT-L in terms of PSNR by 0.11 dB on average, while consuming only 28.05% and 19.08% of its memory consumption and complexity, respectively. Code will be available at https://github.com/XY-boy/FreMamba